The present invention relates to an information processing system such as a video game machine and a method for such processing, more specifically to an operation terminal device such as a video game machine controller or an information transmission device for transmitting information therebetween and a method for such transmission, and still more specifically to an information processing system comprising a plurality of operation terminal devices and an information processing device such as an entertainment system comprising a video game machine and a plurality of controllers, a processing program for executing such operations and a recording medium storing such processing program.
There is known a video game machine having controller ports capable of connecting a plurality of controllers, to thereby allow a plurality of players to enjoy the same game through individually controlling such controllers.
For a game enjoyed by a plurality of players through such individual operations of the controllers, it is necessary that the correlation between the individual game characters appear on a television monitor and the individual controllers for operating such game characters can be recognized by the players by themselves.
The game will never proceed smoothly if the players cannot recognize by themselves that which game character is controlled by which controller, so that it is particularly important for such game that the correlation between the game characters and the controllers can be recognized by the players.
It is to be noted now that the matters controlled by the controller are not limited to the game characters, and that the matters which should clearly be correlated with the controllers are again not limited to the game characters, while the above description exemplifies those for simplicity.
In a conventional video game machine, controller ports are provided to the main unit of the game machine and controllers operated by a player are connected via cables in one-to-one manner, so that each player recognizes the correlation between a game character and a controller responsible for the operation thereof by tracing the cable and confirming a position (a port number assigned to each port, for example) of a controller port to which the controller under handling by the player is connected. For example, for the case that game character “a” is operable via a first controller port by a controller, and that game character “b” is operable via a second controller port by another controller, each player can know its own controllable game character by tracing the cable and confirming a port number to which the controller is connected.
Some of conventional applications for the video game machine (game application program or device driver program) are known to allow the controllers in a number larger than that of the controller port by using a port duplicator (multi-tap).
Such method for recognizing which controller is connected to which controller port by tracing the cable is, however, disadvantageous in that such cable tracing is labor-consuming, which makes it difficult to confirm the correlation between the controller ports and the individual controllers connected thereto in particular for the case that the video game machine and the controllers are rather distant from each other while being connected with long cables, or for the case that a large number of controllers are connected to the video game machine via tangled cables. This means that confirming the correlation between the controller operated by the player and the game character becomes difficult or labor-consuming.